May 28, 1918 - The Business of Life and Alice Joyce

Today Mary goes to the movies with sister Nora to see The Business of Life starring Alice Joyce.  Mary enjoyed the film.  Movie summary from IMDB:
Carrying on with the antique business of her deceased father, Jacqueline Nevers ( Alice Joyce ) is asked to catalog James Desboro's ( Walter McGrail ) collection. When they fall in love, it induces the jealousy of Elena Clydesdale, a married woman who is also in love with James. Jacqueline and James marry, but Elena endangers their happiness by announcing that she and James are having an affair. When Elena becomes ill, she becomes reconciled with her husband and confesses her lies to Jacqueline, permitting the newlyweds to live in peace.

Alice Joyce, "The Madonna of the Screen", was born in 1890 and died in 1955.  She starred in multiple films from 1910 to 1930.  Many of her films have been lost including The Business of Life.  A very detailed biography can be found at IMDB.

May 26, 1918 - Jews to Palestine

Another quiet day for Mary.  Went to church and to work.  But as usual, so much else is going on in the world that would affect conditions for the remainder of the 20th century and beyond.  This from today's third page of The Philadelphia Inquirer:

 

There is a very detailed accounting of Palestine and the Jews in and around the time of World War I at the Jewish Virtual Library.  A couple paragraphs from that site:

The final British pledge, and the one that formally committed the British to the Zionist cause, was the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. Before the emergence of David Lloyd George as prime minister and Arthur James Balfour as foreign secretary in December 1916, the Liberal Herbert Asquith government had viewed a Jewish entity in Palestine as detrimental to British strategic aims in the Middle East. Lloyd George and his Tory supporters, however, saw British control over Palestine as much more attractive than the proposed British-French condominium. Since the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Palestine had taken on increased strategic importance because of its proximity to the Suez Canal, where the British garrison had reached 300,000 men, and because of a planned British attack on Ottoman Syria originating from Egypt. Lloyd George was determined, as early as March 1917, that Palestine should become British and that he would rely on its conquest by British troops to obtain the abrogation of the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
In the new British strategic thinking, the Zionists appeared as a potential ally capable of safeguarding British imperial interests in the region. Furthermore, as British war prospects dimmed throughout 1917, the War Cabinet calculated that supporting a Jewish entity in Palestine would mobilize America's influential Jewish community to support United States intervention in the war and sway the large number of Jewish Bolsheviks who participated in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to keep Russia in the war. Fears were also voiced in the Foreign Office that if Britain did not come out in favor of a Jewish entity in Palestine the Germans would preempt them. Finally, both Lloyd George and Balfour were devout churchgoers who attached great religious significance to the proposed reinstatement of the Jews in their ancient homeland.